He is whining a bit, but I certainly feel his pain.

I've seen more then one project grind to a halt for a day or more because an admin was the only one who had authority to change or fix something and couldn't be found. This is doubly frustrating when you know what needs to be fixed and the admin doesn't so you end up telling him step by step what to do.

I've lost more then a week of work because the backup system had been down for over a month, and the admins didn't bother to tell anyone till a development server hard drive crashed.

I've had to work with source control so unstable that the developers kept seperate copies of their work on their machines to fix the source control when it decided to roll back days of work for no reason.

I think what he is missing though is that admins do often have good reasons for doing things that get in the programmers way. The admin who programmed the virus scanner to check everything multiple times per day was probably responding to a stupid programmer who couldn't be convinced to stop installing random crap on his computer.

It's one of those cases where there needs to be a balance, and I've worked at companies where it went to far in both directions. I've worked places where programmers regularly brought down the system because they had rights to change things on production severs and used them to experiment.

I've also worked places where none of the programmers had any admin rights to the development systems and had to put in tech support requests to do things like change the server settings, create new project files and even change the system time on a computer.

Jay